Section: Research Program

Axis 1: sparse models and representations

Efficient sparse models and dictionary design for large-scale data

Sparse models are at the core of many research domains where the large amount and high-dimensionality of digital data requires concise data descriptions for efficient information processing. Recent breakthroughs have demonstrated the ability of these models to provide concise descriptions of complex data collections, together with algorithms of provable performance and bounded complexity.

A crucial prerequisite for the success of today's methods is the knowledge of a “dictionary” characterizing how to concisely describe the data of interest. Choosing a dictionary is currently something of an “art”, relying on expert knowledge and heuristics.

Pre-chosen dictionaries such as wavelets, curvelets or Gabor dictionaries, are based upon stylized signal models and benefit from fast transform algorithms, but they fail to fully describe the content of natural signals and their variability. They do not address the huge diversity underlying modern data much beyond time series and images: data defined on graphs (social networks, internet routing, brain connectivity), vector valued data (diffusion tensor imaging of the brain), multichannel or multi-stream data (audiovisual streams, surveillance networks, multimodal biomedical monitoring).

The alternative to a pre-chosen dictionary is a trained dictionary learned from signal instances. While such representations exhibit good performance on small-scale problems, they are currently limited to low dimensional signal processing due to the necessary training data, memory requirements and computational complexity. Whether designed or learned from a training corpus, dictionary-based sparse models and the associated methodology fail to scale up to the volume and resolution of modern digital data, for they intrinsically involve difficult linear inverse problems. To overcome this bottleneck, a new generation of efficient sparse models is needed, beyond dictionaries, encompassing the ability to provide sparse and structured data representations as well as computational efficiency. For example, while dictionaries describe low-dimensional signal models in terms of their “synthesis” using few elementary building blocks called atoms, in “analysis” alternatives the low-dimensional structure of the signal is rather “carved out” by a set of equations satisfied by the signal. Linear as well as nonlinear models can be envisioned.

Compressive Learning

A flagship emerging application of sparsity is the paradigm of compressive sensing, which exploits sparse models at the analog and digital levels for the acquisition, compression and transmission of data using limited resources (fewer/less expensive sensors, limited energy consumption and transmission bandwidth, etc.). Besides sparsity, a key pillar of compressive sensing is the use of random low-dimensional projections. Through compressive sensing, random projections have shown their potential to allow drastic dimension reduction with controlled information loss, provided that the projected signal vector admits a sparse representation in some transformed domain. A related scientific domain, where sparsity has been recognized as a key enabling factor, is Machine Learning, where the overall goal is to design statistically founded principles and efficient algorithms in order to infer general properties of large data collections through the observation of a limited number of representative examples. Marrying sparsity and random low-dimensional projections with machine learning shall allow the development of techniques able to efficiently capture and process the information content of large data collections. The expected outcome is a dramatic increase of the impact of sparse models in machine learning, as well as an integrated framework from the signal level (signals and their acquisition) to the semantic level (information and its manipulation), and applications to data sizes and volumes of collections that cannot be handled by current technologies.